We publish an unofficial translation of the weekly editorial of the popular and democratic newspaper A Nova Democracia.

Weekly Editorial – We are witnessing the slow death of a world system

Editorial Staff of AND

21st of March 2023

The bankruptcy of three major US banks foreshadows tremors at the center of the most powerful imperialist economy on the planet. The first was Silicon Valley Bank; then Silvergate and Signature Bank, both of which operated in the cryptocurrency market, went bankrupt. Then, several banks in the global financial system went into the category of “toxic assets” (risk of bankruptcy), the most prominent of which were Swiss Credit Suisse and US First Republic Bank.

As a result, the Yankee imperialist state came to the rescue of the assets of the financial capital magnates. The state Deposit Insurance Fund was triggered by the White House, providing more than 100 billion dollars. A shameless transfer of money from the public treasury to the financial oligarchy.

We are witnessing the slow and prolonged decomposition of a world system of domination and oppression, imperialism. The Davos Forum – where the 2,700 most powerful oligarchs of financial capital have gathered – in its 2023 report entitled “Global Risks”, attests to this serious structural crisis of the imperialist system: “The world faces inflation, cost of living crises, trade wars, capital flight, widespread social discontent, geopolitical confrontation and the specter of a nuclear war. Serious risks of the imperialist system that, according to its own advocates and beneficiaries, “are amplified by unsustainable levels of debt, an era of low growth, low investment, decline in human development.” “These crises are converging to shape a unique, uncertain and turbulent decade ahead of us,” the report concludes. They even give a name to the nightmare they are submerged in: “poly-crises.” An artificial synonym for the general crisis of the decomposition of capital in its terminal stage, with which they want to hide the reality of the abyss into which they have dragged the world.

What does the tycoons’ report find? The general crisis of decomposition of imperialism, but at a new level of quality in this decade, a level of general crisis without precedent. It is enough to observe that since the end of the Second World War, the growth rates of the world GDP demonstrate, in relative form, the law of the tendency of falling rate of profit, revealed by Marx in “Capital”. According to data from the World Bank itself, between 1961 and 1970, the growth rates varied at an average of 5.4% per year, and then went on to decrease until it reached 3.12% per year between 1981-1990, and then reached an average of 2.2% per year in the last decade (2010-2020).

There is only one formula for the imperialists to try to momentarily slow down the tendency of the falling rate of profit, but without any positive effect on the parasitism of their economy: to deepen the maximum exploitation, of the proletariat and the oppressed nations, to unprecedented levels, and to destroy on a large scale the productive forces, which will lead to the concentrating and centralizing capital to the extreme, monopolizing the markets and sources of raw materials and energy in the hands of an even smaller number of superpowers and powers, and to expand the wars of preying and plunder of the oppressed nations far beyond what they do today, objectives that only a great world war can make possible, as proven by the two great wars of the early and mid-20th Century.

Although the superpowers and other imperialist powers fear a new world war, first, because of all the uncertainties about their own destinies with it, and second, because of the historical experience of the two previous ones that came to an end (the first, the Great October Socialist Revolution and the second, a socialist camp), in spite of this, it is the path and direction in which capital marches. Such are the most recent wars in Syria and the Ukraine, in which its interests rival behind them; in addition to these, in an attempt to give survival to its system, draconian measures in the imperialist countries themselves – as we now see in France, when the government by decree imposed a pension reform unanimously rejected by the masses – and the growth of the police state with increasing restrictions on freedoms and rights, fomenting the political forces of the extreme right on a world scale and in the same proportion increasing the breeding ground for fascism.

The masses, however, experienced in more than a century of deception and frustration by bourgeois democracy or by the experiments of fascism, will not accept being governed as before. The historical and political trend is revolution, a new period of revolutions, as the masters of Davos themselves fear.